Disaster Recovery and Cloud Computing: A Match Made in Heaven

For any company’s IT department, it’s important to be ready and able to handle the fallout that comes with the complete loss of a data center.

It’s one thing to have a highly accessible environment to ensure consistent access to your online data; it’s another thing entirely to recover from the loss of a data center due to natural disasters or data destruction from sabotage.

Recovering from the complete loss of an on-premise data center can be tough. The more data you had on the servers in that one center, the harder it is to go back to normal when a catastrophe occurs.

However, disaster recovery doesn’t have to be difficult, especially when you’re working with a cloud service provider to provide disaster recovery services for your company. In fact, using the cloud for disaster recovery is pretty much the perfect way to handle your company’s DR needs.

Benefits of Using the Cloud for Disaster Recovery

Why is the cloud the perfect match for your disaster recovery needs?

Here are a few reasons:

Geographical Diversity. You never know when a natural disaster can strike a data center. When mother nature strikes, even the most hardened structures can fail. Using the cloud for disaster recovery allows for remote backups of your mission-critical data to be stored in remote locations. This way, if a data center in Florida is destroyed by storms, you can recover your data from a backup server in Virginia or Nevada.

Speed of Recovery. Using the cloud for disaster recovery can greatly speed up the process. Meeting your Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) is incredibly difficult when you’re relying on manual recovery methods to re-enter lost data from physical onsite media. With a premium cloud service, meeting RTOs is as simple as downloading your latest backup from the server.

Completeness of Recovery. Another issue with using physical storage media to backup data locally for disaster recovery is that it’s all too easy to lose data. Either individuals forget to make a nightly backup of their critical data, or the physical media gets lost/destroyed in the disaster. This causes gaps in your recovered data. Using the cloud, you can automate the backup process, sending complete images of your data to a secure remote storage facility at regular intervals so that no data is lost.

Naturally, the more thorough your disaster recovery via the cloud solution is, the more it will cost.

For example, having a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) where your data is backed up at least once 4 hours will cost more than an RPO where you’re only backing up data once every day or week. However, the benefit of losing less data once the recovery is complete can more than make up for the cost difference when a disaster strikes.

No system made by man is 100% proof against failure from accidents, sabotage, or acts of nature. However, just because you lose one data center doesn’t mean you have to lose all of your mission-critical data. At least, not when IT professionals leverage the power of cloud-based disaster recovery.

Cloud computing and disaster recovery really is a match made in heaven.